SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — A warehouse along the Savannah River
is holding historical treasures that evidence suggests remained
lost for more than 240 years — a cache of 19 cannons that
researchers suspect came from British ships scuttled to the river
bottom during the American Revolution.

The mud- and rust-encrusted guns were discovered by accident
when a dredge scooping sediment from the riverbed last year as
part of a $973 million deepening of Savannah’s busy shipping
channel surfaced with one of the cannons clasped in its metal
jaws. The crew soon dug up two more.

Archaeologists guessed they were possibly leftover relics from
a sunken Confederate gunship excavated a few years earlier in
the same area, according to Andrea Farmer, an archaeologist
for the Army Corps of Engineers. But experts for the U.S. Navy
found they didn’t match any known cannons used in the Civil
War. Further research indicates they’re likely almost a century
older and sank during the  buildup to the Revolutionary War’s
bloody siege of Savannah in 1779.

Fort Jackson just outside Savannah, Ga.

Painting of The Siege of Savannah.

SANDY KOZEL

2014

James (Jay) Douglas Muir Leno is 72 today.

Ulysses S. Grant (April 27, 1822 – July 23, 1885)

Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War leader and 18th president of the United 
States, was born on April 27, 1822.

The son of a tanner, Grant showed little enthusiasm for joining his 
father’s business, so the elder Grant enrolled his son at West Point
in 1839. Though Grant later admitted in his memoirs the he had no interest in the military apart from honing his equestrian skills, he
graduated in 1843 and went on to serve in the Mexican-American
War, though he opposed it on moral grounds. He then left his 
beloved wife and children again to fulfill a tour of duty in California
and Oregon.

ED DANAHUE

Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi
(25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937)

Marconi was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known
for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system.This led to Marconi being credited as the inventor of radio,
and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand
Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".